Network Working Group H. Alvestrand
Request for Comments: 3935 Cisco Systems
BCP: 95 October 2004
Category: Best Current Practice
A Mission Statement for the IETF
Status of this Memo
This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the
Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004).
Abstract
This memo gives a mission statement for the IETF, tries to define the
terms used in the statement sufficiently to make the mission
statement understandable and useful, argues why the IETF needs a
mission statement, and tries to capture some of the debate that led
to this point.
1. Mission Statement
The goal of the IETF is to make the Internet work better.
The mission of the IETF is to produce high quality, relevant
technical and engineering documents that influence the way people
design, use, and manage the Internet in such a way as to make the
Internet work better. These documents include protocol standards,
best current practices, and informational documents of various kinds.
The IETF will pursue this mission in adherence to the following
cardinal principles:
Open process - any interested person can participate in the work,
know what is being decided, and make his or her voice heard on the
issue. Part of this principle is our commitment to making our
documents, our WG mailing lists, our attendance lists, and our
meeting minutes publicly available on the Internet.
Technical competence - the issues on which the IETF produces its
documents are issues where the IETF has the competence needed to
speak to them, and that the IETF is willing to listen to
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RFC 3935 IETF Mission Statement October 2004
technically competent input from any source. Technical competence
also means that we expect IETF output to be designed to sound
network engineering principles - this is also often referred to as
"engineering quality".
Volunteer Core - our participants and our leadership are people who
come to the IETF because they want to do work that furthers the
IETF's mission of "making the Internet work better".
Rough consensus and running code - We make standards based on the
combined engineering judgement of our participants and our real-
world experience in implementing and deploying our specifications.
Protocol ownership - when the IETF takes ownership of a protocol or
function, it accepts the responsibility for all aspects of the
protocol, even though some aspects may rarely or never be seen on
the Internet. Conversely, when the IETF is not responsible for a
protocol or function, it does not attempt to exert control over
it, even though it may at times touch or affect the Internet.
2. Definition of Terms
Mission: What an organization sets out to do. This is in contrast to
its goal (which is what it hopes to achieve by fulfilling its
mission), and to its activities (which is what specific actions it
takes to achieve its mission).
The Internet: A large, heterogeneous collection of interconnected
systems that can be used for communication of many different types
between any interested parties connected to it. The term includes
both the "core Internet" (ISP networks) and "edge Internet"
(corporate and private networks, often connected via firewalls,
NAT boxes, application layer gateways and similar devices). The
Internet is a truly global network, reaching into just about every
country in the world.
The IETF community wants the Internet to succeed because we
believe that the existence of the Internet, and its influence on
economics, communication, and education, will help us to build a
better human society.
Standard: As used here, the term describes a specification of a
protocol, system behaviour or procedure that has a unique
identifier, and where the IETF has agreed that "if you want to do
this thing, this is the description of how to do it". It does not
imply any attempt by the IETF to mandate its use, or any attempt
to police its usage - only that "if you say that you are doing
this according to this standard, do it this way". The benefit of
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RFC 3935 IETF Mission Statement October 2004
a standard to the Internet is in interoperability - that multiple
products implementing a standard are able to work together in
order to deliver valuable functions to the Internet's users.
Participants: Individuals who participate in the process are the
fundamental unit of the IETF organization and the IETF's work.
The IETF has found that the process works best when focused around
people, rather than around organizations, companies, governments
or interest groups. That is not to say that these other entities
are uninteresting - but they are not what constitutes the IETF.
Quality: In this context, the ability to express ideas with enough
clarity that they can be understood in the same way by all people
building systems to conform to them, and the ability (and
willingness) to describe the properties of the system well enough
to understand important consequences of its design, and to ensure
that those consequences are beneficial to the Internet as a whole.
It also means that the specifications are designed with adherence
to sound network engineering principles, so that use for its
intended purpose is likely to be effective and not harmful to the
Internet as a whole.
Relevant: In this context, useful to some group of people who have to
make decisions that affect the Internet, including, but not
limited to, hardware and software implementors, network builders,
network operators, and users of the Internet. Note that it does
not mean "correct" or "positive" - a report of an experiment that
failed, or a specification that clearly says why you should not
use it in a given situation, can be highly relevant - for deciding
what NOT to do. A part of being relevant is being timely - very
often, documents delivered a year after core decisions have been
taken are far less useful than documents that are available to the
decision-makers at decision time.
3. The Need for a Mission Statement
The IETF has to make decisions. And in some cases, people acting on
behalf of the IETF have to make decisions without consulting the
entire IETF first.
There are many reasons for this, including the near-impossibility of
getting an informed consensus opinion on a complex subject out of a
community of several thousand people in a short time.
Having a defined mission is one of the steps we can take in order to
evaluate alternatives: Does this help or hinder the mission, or is it
orthogonal to it? If there are limited resources, are there things
that they could be invested in that help the mission better?
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RFC 3935 IETF Mission Statement October 2004
(Another step is to choose leaders that we trust to exercise their
good judgement and do the right thing. But we're already trying to
do that.)
4. Issues with Scoping the IETF's Mission
4.1. The Scope of the Internet
A very difficult issue in discussing the IETF's mission has been the
scope of the term "for the Internet". The Internet is used for many
things, many of which the IETF community has neither interest nor
competence in making standards for.
The Internet isn't value-neutral, and neither is the IETF. We want
the Internet to be useful for communities that share our commitment
to openness and fairness. We embrace technical concepts such as
decentralized control, edge-user empowerment and sharing of
resources, because those concepts resonate with the core values of
the IETF community. These concepts have little to do with the
technology that's possible, and much to do with the technology that
we choose to create.
At the same time, it is clear that many of the IETF-defined
technologies are useful not only for the Internet, but also for
networks that have no direct relation to the Internet itself.
In attempting to resolve the question of the IETF's scope, perhaps
the fairest balance is struck by this formulation: "protocols and
practices for which secure and scalable implementations are expected
to have wide deployment and interoperation on the Internet, or to
form part of the infrastructure of the Internet."
In addition to this constraint, we are also constrained by the
principle of competence: Where we do not have, and cannot gather, the
competence needed to make technically sound standards, we should not
attempt to take the leadership.
4.2. The Balance Between Research, Invention and Adoption
The IETF has traditionally been a community for experimentation with
things that are not fully understood, standardization of protocols
for which some understanding has been reached, and publication of
(and refinement of) protocols originally specified outside the IETF
process.
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RFC 3935 IETF Mission Statement October 2004
All of these activities have in common that they produce documents -
but the documents should be judged by very different criteria when
the time to publish comes around, and it's not uncommon to see people
confused about what documents are in which category.
In deciding whether or not these activities should be done within the
IETF, one should not chiefly look at the type of activity, but the
potential benefit to the Internet - an experiment that yields
information about the fact that an approach is not viable might be of
greater benefit to the Internet than publishing a standard that is
technically competent, but only useful in a few special cases.
For research of an essentially unbounded nature, with unknown
probability of success, it may be more relevant to charter a research
group than a standards group. For activities with a bounded scope -
such as specifying several alternative protocols to the point where
experiments can identify the better one for standardization - the
IETF's working group mechanism may be an appropriate tool.
4.3. The Balance Between Mission and Procedures
The mission is intended to state what the IETF is trying to achieve.
There are many methods that can be chosen to achieve these outcomes -
for instance, the appeals procedure is defined so that we can detect
cases where our fundamental principles of technical competence and
open process has been violated; it is not itself a fundamental value.
Similarly, the question of what body in the IETF declares that a
document is ready for publication is entirely outside the mission
statement; we can imagine changing that without in any way impacting
what the IETF mission is - even though it may significantly impact
the ability to achieve that mission.
4.4. The Reach of the Internet
The Internet is a global phenomenon. The people interested in its
evolution are from every culture under the sun and from all walks of
life. The IETF puts its emphasis on technical competence, rough
consensus and individual participation, and needs to be open to
competent input from any source. The IETF uses the English language
for its work is because of its utility for working in a global
context.
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RFC 3935 IETF Mission Statement October 2004
4.5. Protocol Ownership
A problem akin to the problem of deciding on the area of the IETF's
competence arises when a protocol that is clearly in the IETF's scope
is used both on and off the Internet - the premier example is of
course the Internet Protocol itself.
Sometimes the IETF defines standards that ultimately see the most use
outside the global Internet. The IETF, having defined the standard,
will continue to provide the necessary administration of that
protocol.
Sometimes the IETF leverages standards that are defined and
maintained by other organizations; we continue to work with those
organizations on their standards and do not attempt to take them
over.
5. Security Considerations
Considering security is one of the core principles of sound network
engineering for the Internet. Apart from that, it's not relevant to
this memo.
6. Acknowledgements
This document is a result of many hours of debate, countless reviews,
and limitless emails. As such, any acknowledgements section is bound
to be incomplete.
Among the many who provided input were the current members of the
IESG (Alex Zinin, Allison Mankin, Bert Wijnen, Bill Fenner, David
Kessens, Jon Peterson, Margaret Wasserman, Russ Housley, Scott
Hollenbeck, Steve Bellovin, Ted Hardie, Thomas Narten) and recent
IESG members (Ned Freed, Randy Bush, Erik Nordmark), as well as
multiple IAB members, and many members from the community, including
James Polk, John Klensin, Pekka Savola, Paul Hoffman, Eliot Lear,
Jonne Soininen, Fred Baker, Dean Anderson, John Leslie, Susan Harris,
and many others. Special thanks go to Leslie Daigle, the IAB chair.
Author's Address
Harald Tveit Alvestrand
Cisco Systems
Weidemanns vei 27
Trondheim 7043
NO
EMail: harald@alvestrand.no
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RFC 3935 IETF Mission Statement October 2004
Full Copyright Statement
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004).
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Acknowledgement
Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
Internet Society.
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